WHO WE ARE, AND WHAT WE DO

Imagine Burundi-Terimbere is a Burundian foundation, which was established in 2012 in order to empower mainly women through education in handcrafts.

The Foundation was established by Gilbert Hakizumukama (Burundi) and Mogens Nygaard Petersen (Denmark), who both have many years of experience from aid- and development work. Since 2012 the handcraft has been joined by teams who today have been trained in producing soap, oil, health products and articles, furniture, clothes, masons, and a water drilling team, combined with WASH training.

Imagine Burundi Terimbere has a commercial approach to poverty reduction. The Mission is to provide the right skills for poor families and communities so they through commerce can establish a future and fight against poverty and gender based violence.

Imagine Burundi is specialized as implementing partner for smaller and larger companies/organizations / NGOs. Together with our partners we create solutions that make the greatest benefit in the villages and communities. We explore, identify and implement the most innovative and sustainable development projects, targeting the individual needs of villages and communities. Our social business plan is to go away from "giving" and instead taking into account people's skills and ideas. All with the purpose of creating jobs so people can get an income.

To support this, we have chosen to have a small but skilled staff, minimizing our costs, and instead using local labor in our project areas. This to let the economy stay in the local community, instead of sending high-paying specialists from Bujumbura. Likewise, it is important for us that local workers feel ownership and responsibility to the locals.

Many donor-funded projects have a time limit, after which the projects "shut down". Sometime, people continue to work on what they learned, but unfortunately, we/Imagine have experienced that many people / communities are unable to carry on with the projects themselves, thus returning to past habits. To avoid this, in Imagine's projects, we chose to set up a company "Imagine Made In Burundi".

From the Imagine Burundi Terimbere Foundation, the company Imagine Made in Burundi harvest valuable results about producing products who have been tested in real life, and therefore have a good chance to succeed in the business marked. We have access to experienced and trained workers we trust in, those will be the core in our production. At the same time Imagine Made in Burundi secure/help the teams to continue have sustainable jobs mainly related to production of hygiene and health products, which also keep Imagines mission about have a social element, social business, intact.

We aim that none of the teams we have trained will be left behind when the donor financed projects shut down. We constantly keep in touch with the teams and create BEST PRACTICE FORUM for the teams so they can exchange ideas-what went well and what went wrong with each other. At the same time, we help the teams find sales channels for their various products.